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Now Available in English: Paul Virilio's The Futurism of the Instant: Stop-Eject

Cover image: Joy Garnett, "Freeway" (2009) oil on canvas. 38 x 44 inches. 

 The Futurism of the Instant: Stop-Eject
By Paul Virilio. Translation by Julie Rose.

Polity, Cambridge, UK (2010)

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With around 645 million people expected to be displaced "by wars and other catastrophes" by 2050, Virilio begins The Futurism of the Instant by looking at the future of human settlement and migration through the evolution of the city. What he finds is an accelerating exodus from the city as we have known it, an exodus that reverses the desertion of the countryside for the city in the past. This exodus creates a circulating city of transients on the move that will remove us further and further from our native lands en route to the ultimate exile, beyond planet Earth itself -- something the world's mad scientists have already been planning for some time.

Exploring the shifts in scale involved in such population flows and the fraught and complex relationship between sedentary settlement and globalization, Virilio considers what the resultant loss of identity might mean, not only in terms of the exhaustion of biodiversity, but also in terms of the catastrophic elimination of temporal diversity, with the compression and fragmentation of time enabled by the nanotechnologies in an ever increasing acceleration of reality. This previously unimaginable prospect is brought closer by the accident of an instant that wipes out all distinction between past, present and future within the black hole of globalized interconnectivity.

 

More about Paul Virilio (Wikipedia);

More book covers from Joy Garnett.

Found Art (Soho): Unmonumental 254

Found Art (Soho): Unmonumental 254, originally uploaded by Joy Garnett (archive).

 

Found Art (Broadway): Unmonumental 253

Found Art (Broadway): Unmonumental 253, originally uploaded by Joy Garnett (archive).

 

Beyond the Art World...

Visitors underneath Leandro Erlich’s Swimming Pool installation at PS1, 2009

[A farewell from BEN DAVIS, associate editor of Artnet Magazine, 2005-2010.]

via artnet:

Beyond the Art World

by Ben Davis

I do not like the term "art world." It’s a useful term, of course, a kind of shorthand for something like "the professional sphere of the visual arts." "The art world thinks. . ." "Art-world concerns. . ." Etcetera. But the truth is, art is not a world unto itself. Art is part of the world. And that fact has to be a fundamental starting point for everything.

It is not my goal to become an "art person." For some people, being an "art person" is their main ambition. Paradoxically, when I talk to such people, I quickly become confused about why they are interested in art. They are interested in art as a world, I guess, as an environment to inhabit: for the parties, the people, the gossip, the money, the vague and ill-defined aura of intelligence and importance that art gives off.

Art is a complex social act, and one of the primary passions. Perhaps not so primary as food, or love, or sex, or shelter -- but very important. People will suffer for art, for a shot at creative self-expression. Nevertheless, art cannot and does not exist on its own, and slipping into the habit of addressing the sphere of the visual arts as a self-enclosed universe is a recipe for sapping art of its social vitality.

The movement of art and art criticism, as I have come to see it, is a movement of threading, of finding the points where art and its world connect back to everything else, the big, beautiful, sometimes fucked up and scary world beyond it. If you can’t stomach being interested in the wider world and having a thought about it, and figuring out how that relates back to what artists are doing in the present, then all you are left with is meaningless professional opinion, of interest mainly to other art professionals or those in their spell. 

To say you should approach art politically is not necessarily the same as demanding that art be political. In fact, quite often the sterile imperative to make "political art" is just a kind of inverted expression of art-world solipsism. To whom is political art addressed? "Art people?" One mark of the insularity of the visual arts these days is that art mainly becomes part of the larger political conversation in a negative way, at those moments where some exhibition comes under fire from conservatives.

We are all creative people, we all have art in our blood. But [read on...]

5 Questions with Carin Kuoni...

“By Any Name: Institutional Memory at The New School,” installation view at The New School, October 2009.

 

via Ethiopian Review:

5 Questions with Carin Kuoni of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics

by Thom Donovan | November 18th, 2010 at 7:49 pm

For six years, Carin Kuoni has been director of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School in New York City. I wanted to pose my five questions to Kuoni because I see her as someone truly in the middle of a discourse about how art may affect the public sphere as that discourse continues to take shape and evolve.

The Vera List Center (VLC) has consistently presented programs that have brought culture workers together across disciplines to discuss a broad range of topics and problems related to cultural politics and aesthetics. Two of the events that I have attended at the VLC, which I found overwhelmingly thoughtful and compelling, were a conversation in the Fall of 2009 between Galit Eilat, a curator for the Center for Digital Arts in Holon, Israel; Chen Tamir, director of the Queens-based Flux Factory; and Reem Fadda, a Palestinian art historian currently employed by the Guggenheim. During this event, Eilat and co-presenters discussed the Center for Digital Art’s project for a Mobile Archive, a traveling archive of DVDs showcasing work by artists in the Middle-East intended to travel across cultural, national, and symbolic boundaries. The event made me think in crucial ways about how archives may intervene in the Middle-Eastern conflict, and how art may play a role in promoting cultural understanding and dialogue faced with impasse.

More recently this fall, I was able to attend the launch of Lin + Lam’s online archive project, Change Encounters, which offers interviews with workers from a broad range of disciplines speculating on social transformation, and which is part of VLC’s current program focus on Speculating on Change. During this particular presentation, Lin + Lam, who developed this project during their 2009-2010 Vera List Center fellowship, presented materials from the archive and read their playful musings about “chance” and “coincidence.” I also heard talks from a philosophy professor who researches affect, a writer who had published a book about the history of the Ouija board, and a person who had worked for a psychic hotline.

Something unique about the VLC – and Kuoni’s approach as a curator (as you will see below) – is the extent to which she has thought through the ramifications of her programming and the VLC’s relationship both within the larger institution of The New School as well as the institutions and communities with which it has worked. I particularly admire that the VLC’s events tend to relate and build upon one another and reflect a curatorial ethos. I also admire very much the evolution of the VLC from strictly organizing programs and events towards more recently producing curricular documents (textbooks, anthologies) and creating a fellowship program intended to bring scholars, teachers, and artists to the university to participate in programs and curriculum.

For universities, institutions, and groups wishing to explore models for programming and curriculum, they would be well advised to pay close attention to Kuoni’s past and ongoing work at the VLC.

5 Questions with Carin Kuoni

1. What’s the history of your involvement with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics?
A disparate collection of stops along a curatorial pathway shaped by seemingly incongruous experiences: early on, for instance, the encounter with one of Jenny Holzer’s Truisms, carved into an Alpine rock at an altitude of 10,000 feet – powerful in absolute solitude. Group Material’s Project on Democracy at the old Dia Art Foundation space in SoHo, just as the art world was returning to the area from the gentrified LES. The Living Museum at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center, at the time one of the largest psychiatric facilities in the country and a town unto itself with an entire abandoned building (and lots of patients) committed to art through the initiative of Polish artist Bolek Greczynski. There was Fashion Moda. And Tim Rollins & K.O.S. And Seven Thousand Oaks by Joseph Beuys.

Increasingly, the puzzle became: how to construct arguments for art’s significance to the everyday when immediate concerns about poverty, racism, the privatization of the public sphere, xenophobia, or environmental pollution dominate. How to create – and legitimize – a space of reflection and pause, freedom or respite, to allow for critical thinking? Institutionally, there was first the Swiss Institute, an independent cultural center that I directed for five years and filled, for instance, with a Russian artists’ installation (Inspection Medical Hermeneutics), explosives (Gregory Green), chocolate, or 19^th century paintings of Swiss farm maids to both defy and embrace expectations, and to challenge assumptions about culture, citizenship, and identity.

Then came Independent Curators International, an agency for the development, production, and dissemination of curatorial ideas that frames, through exhibitions, pertinent issues in society. There I was Director of Exhibitions. We produced Komar & Melamid’s Most Wanted project on democracy in art; a retrospective of Mark Lombardi’s diagrammatic drawings of the complete intertwinement of corporate and political entities, and lots of other shows on new media and more, albeit always out of an office, without ever seeing the exhibitions.

The Vera List Center is the place where art can be experienced, practiced, studied, and disseminated: kind of ideal. I arrived here six years ago.

2. Why do you feel there is a need for organizations such as the VLC, which provides a forum for many of our politically most astute artists, thinkers, and scholars?
You provide the answer yourself: the center is needed because it provides a forum precisely for such people – who, by the way, include an extremely sophisticated audience. [read on...]